Activists demonstrate on May 17, 2017, in front of the building where the Canadian Consulate is located in Seattle, Washington.The demonstrators demanded that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau withdraw support for the Canadian Tar Sands projects. (JASON REDMOND/AFP/Getty Images)

Placards and protesters are at the ready in Burnaby, B.C., where construction will begin shortly to twin the Trans Mountain bitumen pipeline. In Quebec, hearings on Energy East are on hold, as that pipeline’s would-be builder chafes at the National Energy Board’s new plan to weigh the impact of its upstream climate-change impact. And around Fort McMurray, Alta., thousands of workers continue to use mining trucks and steam-assisted gravity draining (SAGD) to extract nearly three million barrels of oil daily, confident that folks somewhere will demand the stuff, no matter how it gets to refineries and customers.

There was a time, before the latest price crash, that the oil sands seemed like an unstoppable, little-questioned force of growth and expansion—Canada’s ticket to superpower status. Then, in 2008, a large flock of migratory ducks landed and died in a settling pond for Syncrude’s oil sands waste product—setting in motion, though it was hard to predict at the time, industry-activist tensions that would put northern Alberta’s pay dirt at the forefront of a blistering debate. So writes veteran author Chris Turner in his new book, The Patch: The People, Pipelines, and Politics of the Oil Sands. Though his background is in environmental writing, Turner finds blame on both sides of this ever-noisy and nuance-starved debate. This conversation has been edited for length.

Q: You write that of the 90 million-odd barrels of oil in all the world’s daily supply, none to date has had its necessity as thoroughly audited as the patch’s 2.4 million barrels. Why did this happen?

A: It happened for two reasons. The biggest carbon footprint of any oil is a barrel of oil sands bitumen. There was a legitimate case, and therefore it was already on the radar of Canadian environmental groups and critics. The less-justified reason is that it became a very convenient political target for the larger international climate activism movement at a time of despair coming out of the [2009] Copenhagen climate talks, that Kyoto was dead and there might not be a successor. A handful of environmental groups, predominantly in the U.S., knew they needed some catalyst, some new call to action. And it so happened there was this Keystone XL Pipeline proposal, it had a bunch of things that made it politically convenient for the U.S., in that it went directly to the president, you didn’t have go to Congress. It already had political enemies locally and worries about the aquifer and so on. The symbol became something out of all scale to its actual impact on the atmosphere. Once it became the target, it seemed that no matter what the regional environmental issue was, the ultimate thing was we had to stop the carbon bomb. There was a legitimate premise for that scrutiny, but the criticism eventually outweighed the crime.

Q: If the pipelines are an oil sands proxy war, as you write, is the protest and pushback overblown?

A: You have to separate the climate argument from the other arguments. The Kinder Morgan pipe, for example. There is a pretty legitimate grievance that First Nations along the pipeline route have. It’s ultimately a legal grievance, and as the government has said, it should ultimately go to court, not be settled in the streets. The climate argument that any given pipeline represents a make or break point for the entire world’s or even Canada’s ability to meet greenhouse gas emissions targets, that’s pretty overblown. These pipelines have become really good political organizing tools and catalysts for action. That’s why you continue to see them as these flashpoints. It’s hard to protest against a thing, whether it’s tailpipe emissions, oil extraction in Northern Alberta or the Gulf of Mexico or wherever else. You can actually go to a pipeline site, you can stand there. You can get media attention to it. And it crosses over all these lines: local environmental impact, there’s the climate argument, there’s the First Nations rights argument, there’s the stewardship argument, so it can really draw from a whole wide sector of civil society in the way that the faceless catastrophe of climate change can’t.

Q: In scanning the history of the oil sands, should anyone have foreseen the conflict to come?

A: You really can’t fault the industry until the boom is on in the 2000s. The carbon footprint of a given barrel of oil over any other was not really on the political map when Chrétien was changing the tax code to finance a mine and Klein was rewriting the royalty regime to make it easier to expand the industry. At that point that really wasn’t on the radar anywhere. But you could see the criticism beginning to mount and grow more vehement, in 2006, 2007, 2008, where you even had groups with industry members on them saying, “Look, the scale of growth is out of control.” And there were these early warning signs, and that’s why I start the book with the Syncrude duck incident, because that was in a sense the sneak preview of this thing—that to the industry was a shrug, but it became a thing that haunted them for years afterward. Had they been paying enough attention then, they might have recognized the way this is playing out in the broader public is changing, and we should pay attention. The industry and a lot of its defenders actually retrenched around the idea of screw you, everybody needs oil. I think there was a tactical error there, and that had the industry been ready for it once that first wave of anti-Keystone protest came on, it could have been defused before it became a global campaign that couldn’t be stopped anymore. And that’s where we are now, where no given pipeline company or ministerial department could possibly adequately respond to the amount of opposition there now is.

Q: The economics since 2014 have changed dramatically. You see economist Peter Tertzakian say that it’s not just the end of the megaprojects, but that oil sands are yesterday’s news. What impact does that have?

A: The pipe dreams of eight million barrels of oil a day from the oil sands are almost certainly never going to be achieved. Now it’s more focused on the stuff we’re already producing and the other really good deposits we have in our portfolios. Is there a way we can do that at a cost that keeps us competitive? That, to some degree, is a more immediate question to a lot of them than the carbon budget problem. As I talk to Harbir Chhina [an executive vice-president at Cenovus], he’s way more worried about huge shale plays in Texas than he is about not getting a pipeline built.

Q: And as that happens, does the activists’ gaze shift away from the oil sands as well?

A: Maybe not. I think the pipeline proxy debate unfortunately has real legs, if you’re sitting 30,000 feet above and you’re asking what’s the most effective way for Canada to reduce its carbon footprint. Spending the next five, 10 years fighting over pipelines does not seem the best way to do that. But it’s very hard to get people out of those trenches now that they’re in them.

Q: You conclude that “there is no common ground. And that is how both sides lose.” It seems the federal Liberals are trying to find something in the middle, with their mantra that the economy and environment go hand in hand. What progress are they making?

A: They’re doing a not-bad job of it if that’s your goal, to find that big mushy middle where the Liberal party likes to live, where most Canadians or at least a lot of Canadians see themselves: we see the benefits of this industry and want it do continue to prop up our economic success, while we also see that we need to move away from fossil fuels. The thing that remains to be seen is whether they can get enough people onto that middle ground now, or whether the politics just seem too divisive. I don’t have a clear answer for that; maybe they do.

Q: Has one side or another—industry or environmentalists–been better at coming toward that common ground?

A: You could argue that the industry and its partners in government have tried to get better at it. With Notley in Alberta and Trudeau federally, they’ve been willing to work with governments that are not their usual allies, to try to find a way to get what they want done in terms that are acceptable to the opponents. But it feels like some part of that opposition is not going to be moved by anything. They don’t seem to buy the industry’s case, or even the NDP Alberta government’s case for it. The NDP can’t sell it to their own cousins in B.C.

Q: Readers familiar with your work will know your writing on climate change solutions like solar, wind and sustainable communities, and your past as a Green Party candidate. Was there a time when you identified with the climate catastrophe, shut-it-down crowd?

A: There’s no radical, short-term, under-a-decade way to make that shift without total economic catastrophe. You basically have the only post-cod-collapse job creation strategy that has happened in a lot of Atlantic Canada, keeping places like Newfoundland and Cape Breton and some others from having some particularly nasty, chronic problems. You can’t just decide here’s what you should do about CO2 emissions in northern Alberta. You also have to take into account jobs in small-town Nova Scotia at the same time. That gets at the complexity of this. My big thing is this is not a simple issue. If your take on it fits on a protest placard, you’re probably not giving it as much thought as it needs.

Q: You’ve written books in the past in awe of green tech. You seem to have the same reverence for extraction methods, tailings-pond remediation. Is there a solution for zero-emissions oil, as some in the patch predict? Will people one day talk about clean bitumen?

A: I think the zero-added-emissions barrel is not too far out of reasonable technological development from where we are today. The fact is that [emissions from] your average SAGD or mined barrel are significantly larger than the average Saudi crude or Gulf of Mexico barrel. Closing that gap to a point where it’s negligible is certainly within the realm of possibility. Speculating on the future of energy is a good way to look foolish in a couple years. But can they get to the point where they are carbon-budget competitive with the rest of the industry? With the right concerted amount of effort and policies that oblige and encourage that technological development, they can. And that seems worthwhile, given that regardless of how intense the protest, there is an operation up and running to produce this stuff at nearly three million barrels a day, and that’s going to be there for decades. So if we can get that down to the point where at the very least it’s not extra dirty, great.

The first part of their discussion is here. The exciting conclusion is below.

From: PaulTo: Chris, Susan and Brad

It’s interesting that each of you asks a variation on a question I’ve heard a lot on the book trail: “Could we maybe do politics better?” Mixed with, especially in Susan’s case, “Could we maybe do journalism better while we’re at it?” At one stop, in London, Ont., I was asked that sort of thing by the former president of a local Conservative riding executive.

There’s a lot of dismay about the conduct of our politics (illustrated, to me, by the near-evangelical enthusiasm for Mike Chong’s Reform Act, which some of my colleagues portray as a vehicle for transporting Canadian politics from darkness towards light) and about our political journalism. One manifestation of the latter is how eager readers are to label political coverage as overly sympathetic toward parties they don’t like. (I don’t recall ever having a reader complain that my journalism was too kind to a party the reader liked. In other words, I never hear from readers who say, “You’re giving my party a free ride! Toughen up! It’ll do us some good!”)

I do think political reporting in daily newspapers has changed for the worse in 20 years. In the early ’90s, before my time, each large news organization had a few reporters who knew the big debates of the day backwards and forwards. A very high level of issue expertise. Now there’s less of that. But I do think some of that conversation has migrated from the traditional news organizations to books, including ebooks, and while that’s bad news for newspapers I’m not sure it’s particularly bad news for Western civilization.

As for our politics, well, from a certain angle the arrival and tenacity of Stephen Harper is proof that our politics can change. And while I think there’s a reason why the strict message discipline practiced by Harper works, I also think it’s possible to imagine a different style appealing to voters. But I do think it’s fair to say that dissatisfaction with politics as usual is pretty high, judging from what I heard on the book-tour circuit. What did you hear?

From: SusanTo: Paul, Brad and Chris

I think Paul raises some good questions.

Twice this year, I was out on the road for book purposes. The first round was with Justin Trudeau, while I was doing an eRead for the Star on his leadership campaign. The second round, of course, was for Shopping For Votes.

Though it’s probably a mistake to draw too many broad conclusions from the crowds who turned out for these events— they’re kind of self-selecting, in terms of political interest—there’s no question about the level of discontent with politics as usual. They’re annoyed with the polarization, the negativity, the focus on all-scandal-all-the-time. They think things are getting kind of crazy around these parts, and I can’t say I disagree with them.

And yes, some of those problems do rest at the feet of the media—I have found myself thinking a lot lately about why it is, or more specifically, when it was that we stopped being able to report on more than one political story at a time in Ottawa.

I have a couple of rather pedestrian explanations for that phenomenon: all-news TV and then, later, all other forms of technology that allow our editors and commentators outside Ottawa to feel that they’re as much in the loop as those of us doing the daily journalism in the capital.

It works this way: An event happens in Ottawa, and for whatever reason, that’s the story that CBC or CTV choose to cover live. Then everyone on Twitter and other social media pile on. Then our editors, watching the same coverage and conversations, want to make sure we’ve got as much as our competitors on it. If you’re the unlucky reporter with a story not on that same subject, you’ll have a heck of a time breaking through the noise.

So not only do we have fewer reporters, we have less variety in the political stories coming out of the capital every day. I am (unfortunately) old enough to remember a time when we all fanned out and looked for new things all day and only decided at the end of the day what the best story was. Some days it might be a national-unity development, other days it might be a new piece of legislation. Now that best-story-of-the-day decision is being chosen mainly on the basis of what’s making the most noise.

Anyway, in terms of solutions, I’ve been kind of assembling an informal list of thoughts/ideas that got the most heads nodding during the Q&A sessions on the state of politics. Here are the top three:

* A lot of people seemed to like the idea of standards over political advertising. When you point out that the private sector has such standards, and politics has none, they like the idea even better.

* “Taxpayer” is not a synonym for citizen.

* Government should not be seen as something inflicted on citizens, but something that belongs to them.

I’m working on a bigger list, but I’d say these are the thoughts that seem to resonate most with the crowds I’ve been encountering in book-promotion land.

From: BradTo: Paul, Susan and Chris

Picking up on your point Paul, I also sense an increasing sensitivity among people on political coverage and journalists. Maybe because journalists are more accessible than ever before or maybe it’s because the next election is wide open and, as usual, the stakes are very high. Increasingly, people are turning to media sources and specific journalists that support and reinforce their bias (in the U.S., it’s nicely framed as Fox vs MSNBC). The folks that have turned up to my book signings are certainly proof of this. Agreeing with Susan on her point that those who come to book launches are self-selecting, those who come to Orange Wave book events are political by nature and for the most part ridiculously up-to-speed on events of the day. During the book signing in Saskatoon, I had a number of different people at different times come up and ask me about the latest polling numbers, “Did you see that Nik Nanos on Evan just now, Tom’s up in the polls?” “No” I answered, “I was in the cab on the way here.”

New tools have given more outlets to more people to engage the media: the 24-hour news cycle, online sources, the internationalism of content and especially Twitter have all changed the landscape.

Susan and I explore this in our books. In a 1000 channel universe there are very few shared experiences anymore. As a result message discipline by politicians has never been more important. We’re all consuming our information at different times and from different places, therefore constant repetition is important. As for skepticism, the speed with which journalists need to file and the lack of space they are given creates a vacuum that the audience is left to fill. With little time for context and background, suspicion far too often fills in the blanks.

Throughout my fall tour, shorter-term political strategic questions (as opposed to the big-picture questions Susan speaks of) dominated the Q&A sessions. On the news was the Senate/PMO scandal and therefore that’s what people were asking about the most. The folks who come to my events already have a good dose of cynicism around the current crew running the federal government. So perhaps my audience isn’t seeking to make up their minds as much as they are seeking to reinforce their bias in long form.

From: ChrisTo: Brad, Susan and Paul

It’s curious that we started out talking about how (unexpectedly) much interest there was in Canadian politics this fall and now we’re closing off by lamenting the decline of the mass audience and the narrowing of political journalism to single story arcs. Curious, but maybe inevitable—as Brad says, there seems to be a growing scarcity in shared experience, and it’s having an enormous impact on politics and public life in general.

There were cons as well as pros to the days when a handful of media outlets could presume to dictate the national discourse, not least of which was the outsized role certain gatekeepers once played in deciding what stories were allowed into it. But in this first giddy phase of the digital age, one definite negative has been the speed and skill of new communications technology at constructing echo chambers. Not only are we sharing experiences less, we’re having difficulty even agreeing on the basic facts of those things we do witness in common.

I set out with The War on Science to reassert the primacy of objective data and the scientific method in public policy, and yet I suspected it would be nearly impossible to reach those portions of the Canadian public who’d already decided that any strong criticism of this government was not just suspect but totally unworthy of consideration. With us or against us. Everything’s spin. Tribal loyalties trump the truth in nearly every instance. I can’t simply be angry with the desecration of Canada’s scientific tradition, I must be angry for partisan reasons. It’s because I’m one of those treehugger types, a Green loyalist just trying to score easy points and preach to my own choir.

I’m all too familiar with this, coming from the wildly polarized climate change conversation. There is a pretty fascinating and fast-growing literature on the role of “cultural cognition” in the assessment of facts and the estimation of risk if anyone wants to go google it. The upshot is that we not only tend to listen more often to people with whom we share cultural norms and values, but we consciously and unconsciously discount information that comes from outside our tribe if it presents a challenge to the our shared worldview. Among other oddities, studies have found that better informed and more scientifically literate U.S. conservatives are actually more likely to be virulently opposed to the consensus on anthropogenic climate change than people with much less grounding in the science.

And even as we lament this, the master gameplayers in this tribal competition see only greater and greater opportunity. This is of course something that the Conservative Party of Canada—and political parties in general—have become very good at. Message discipline, talking points, the creation of simple (often simplistic) narratives, told over and over, in the face of any and all contradictory evidence, so as to ensure that the distracted mass audience hears the same story whenever and wherever they intersect with it. And the media, yes, serve all too often as willing enablers, chasing those sensational but often meaningless clashes at the expense of the dull complexities of policy and its implications.

Probably the most troubling question I encountered doing publicity for The War on Science—mainly from media interlocutors aiming at a sort of quasi-populist voice—was: Why does it matter to the mythic “average Canadian” if the government is slashing scientific research and reducing its data flows? The intonation always seemed to indicate that said average Canadian was someone far removed from and presumed to be indifferent if not hostile to whatever high-minded talk we’d just been engaging in. The implication was that it all wasn’t going to make a lick of difference to the traffic on tomorrow’s commute or the size of the next pay raise or the price of a double-double down at Tim’s, and so why should anyone care? Could I condense the book’s thesis into a tidy anecdote or soundbite, some kitchen-table talking point in which everyone would recognize their self-interest? And if I couldn’t, well, thanks for playing anyway.

I usually mumbled something about needing to be able to assess future risks and seize new opportunities, but I have to admit even as a jaded journalist and one-time politician I was a bit thrown by the idea that the pursuit of truth—about our world, our place in it, where we are and where we might be going—wasn’t self-justifying. Why does science matter? Why bother with labs or museums? Do we really have to explain that? And if we do, what kind of dangerous public discourse has Canada trapped itself in?

]]>Maclean’s Politics: Four authors on their books and Canadian politicshttp://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/the-macleans-book-club-four-authors-on-their-books-and-canadian-politics/
Tue, 10 Dec 2013 21:51:04 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=447796Paul Wells, Susan Delacourt, Chris Turner and Brad Lavigne on the year in politics and political books

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had far more fun selling a book this autumn than I thought I would. For one, I have real support from my publisher; for two, I have company: Your books, which I’ve read and enjoyed, as well as new books by Joe Clark, Michael Ignatieff, Stephen J. Harper and a few others. It’s an extraordinary autumn for political books, or for political books and one hockey history, or however you want to slice it.

I thought I’d kick off this discussion by kicking two points around. First, why is the fall of 2013 such an unusually fertile moment for political books? I can think of one roughly comparable precedent: in the mid-1990s, when I got into this business, there was a burst of pretty significant “whither Canada?” books, including Susan’s own United We Fall; Richard Gwyn’s Nationalism Without Walls; and Peter C. Newman’s The Canadian Revolution: From Deference to Defiance.

That earlier burst is easy enough to explain: there had been two high-stakes attempts to rewrite the constitution, Meech and Charlottetown; their failures led in a pretty straight line to the destruction of the Progressive Conservative party. There was a lot to talk about. Similarly, I think there’s been much to talk about again in our politics for nearly a decade, but we couldn’t be sure the moment had come until two extraordinary events in mid-2011: the Harper majority and the death of Jack Layton. We have, once again, a lot to talk about.

The other point I want to make is that one of our books is not much like the others. Chris’s book is an angry book, a sustained critique of the sitting government on a major policy file. Brad’s obviously implies systematic disagreement with Stephen Harper’s politics, but it’s really about celebrating a different strain in our national politics, and Susan and I have written fairly emotionally cool books on what could have been a heated topic: the way elections are won these days. I know I spent a lot of time trying to decide my tone before I set about writing, and after I’d begun; I wonder whether you also asked yourself similar questions about the stance to take with regard to your subjects.

Beyond that, I just want author gossip. Any book-tour road stories? How does e-publishing affect your careers as authors? What’s on your mind, as Christmas shopping season looms?

From: Chris To: Paul, Brad and Susan

An angry book? And here I thought I’d done my best to use my inside voice…

In all fairness, though, I did think a lot about tone as I started in on The War on Science. I was motivated by a pretty deep sense of shock and outrage, but I also recognized that many potential readers were neither shocked nor outraged by what had happened since Stephen Harper won his coveted majority in 2011. One of the signature skills of our current federal government is its ability to clothe radical change in the vestments of business as usual.

One of the things I love about Paul’s book is how carefully he walks the line between straight reportage and shrewd analysis. Theres no question that a very smart and informed observer is shaping the story, but at the same time I think all but the most hopeless of partisans would concede it is a fair and empathetic portrait of our Prime Minister. When I started on The War on Science, I was hoping to strike a similar balance, but the story I was uncovering kept pulling me back to a more critical tone.

As a journalist whos spent 15 years in the general vicinity of the environment and climate beats, its been a source of constant frustration that these issues have rarely been given as much attention and weight as they deserve. Its not that editors ignore them so much as they treat them as a cluster of special interests rather than a vital, unfolding, world-war-scale narrative of our fate as a species.

I remember seeing commentary in the wake of this government’s 2012 omnibus budget bill suggesting that the Harper agenda proved to be less radical, in ideological terms, than some had predicted. There was no extreme social conservatism, no stampede to privatization. But if you were viewing the proceedings through a lens of planetary climate crisis, Bill C-38 was one of the most recklessly radical pieces of legislation in the countrys history. When scientists, against professional tradition and general disposition, took to the streets of Ottawa in protest shortly after C-38 became law, I realized there was an important story to tell. And the more I investigated it, the more I understood that there was no truthful way to tell it except as an indictment of a government that had abandoned some of the country’s most cherished traditions—particularly those of evidence-based policy-making and environmental stewardship.

Paul asked for book gossip, so I feel like I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention at this point that the original publisher of The War on Science, Douglas & Macintyre, went bankrupt in the fall of 2012, just as I was waiting on an advance cheque and up to my neck in research. Felt oddly appropriate at the time —the publishing biz in general seemed like it was in pretty grave peril, and who the hell cared about wonky policy stuff? Shrug it off and move on.

The book was sidelined while I ran for Parliament (2012 Calgary Centre by-election, best Green result in Alberta history), and I emerged from campaign mode to learn that Greystone (the D&M subsidiary I was working with) had been saved from its death spiral by Harbour House at the 11th hour. Suddenly the book was back on. It should’ve been published in the spring of 2013, but instead came out in October. Which turned out to be crazy lucky timing —I can’t remember the last time Canadian politics was this hot a topic. Everyday citizens not being paid to do so are listening to live audio from the Senate floor and watching livestreams of Question Period. On purpose! Its a good time to have a book out about a vital policy issue, and I’m flattered by the attention my book has received thus far.

To keep this ball rolling, here are my questions for Susan and Brad: Can the current visceral interest in scandal and intrigue be translated into a more engaged electorate? And if so, how? And what does it mean to parties shopping for the most votes in 2015?

From: Susan To: Chris, Brad and Paul

Greetings, fellow travellers on the (unusually crowded) political-book-promotion circuit. It’s a pleasure to be sharing the road with you this fall. I’ve even had the good fortune of doing book events with Chris and Paul, which were fun.

I’ve been doing some thinking about what our books have in common—besides coming out at the same time. (Some of that coincidence is explained by the fact that three of us—everyone except Paul—had publishing contracts with Douglas & McIntyre, and we were all hit with that unexpected delay. My book was supposed to come out last spring.)

What struck me is the way that all four books expose the limits of daily journalism to tell political stories these days. I know, I know, some of that’s obvious: books have more words in them than news stories, who’d have figured?

But there were moments, reading all of them (and writing my own), when I thought: why haven’t these stories/anecdotes/analyses/narratives showed up in daily journalism? Chris’s book, for instance, ties together a lot of stuff that’s happening right before our eyes, in terms of what’s been happening with science all over the place in politics. And yet, it seems political journalism is more inadequate these days at doing the job of connecting dots. Paul and Brad have given us important glimpses into the political backrooms, which we don’t get all that much now either in our political coverage. As for my own book, I was amazed when I was researching the 1970s and 1980s to see just how much daily journalism was staying on top of the big changes to polling and advertising and public opinion—in a way that it doesn’t do today. Why is that, I wonder?

In a way, it’s great news for the publishing industry that we need full-length books to tell a fuller story of politics. But it’s less-great news for daily or even weekly political journalism. It seems to me that these books, in their own way, are moving into territory that’s been vacated by the political media in the past decade or so.

Anyway, those are my thoughts off the top—happy to hear yours and chat more.

From: Brad To: Paul, Chris and Susan

I write to you from Edmonton, on the last of a three day prairie tour. It is –41 and it’s small consolation that it is a ‘dry’ cold.

I share Paul’s point that it is more fun to sell the book than to research, write and edit it. Meeting people who want to share their stories about Jack and the party, whether partisans or not, has been an unexpected highlight of this whole rewarding experience. Beyond the delays for Susan and Chris’s book, I think this fall’s crop of books on federal politics represents the demand to tell the stories of the changes in federal politics over the last number of years.

Chris’s book joins Joe Clark’s book as a critique of the Harper government’s policy, while Susan’s, Paul’s and my book, join others that speak to the changes in the art of how politics is practised. There has been a lot of change on the federal scene in the past five years and this set of releases help explain and comment on how it has happened and what it means for the country.

There are two notable trends I have observed from the road in the past five weeks; the first is a near obsession with “Quebec” (which is curious as I have centred the first round of touring in Western Canada) and the second is a true desire to understand the Prime Minister’s Office/Senate scandal.

On the surprising focus of “how will Quebec go,” folks on the ground in the west are closely watching what is happening in that province as a clue to where the country will go in the next election. My take away: despite the new seats in Ontario, BC and Alberta, Quebec still matters. As for the PMO/Senate scandal, and this goes to Chris’s question, I am finding that the issue is actually turning people on to federal politics, rather than turning them off. This is corroborated by the increase in eyeballs watching Question Period and the political shows on cable news channels.

The key here as to why so many people are engaged (recognizing that folks who come to my launches are pretty political to begin with) is that the principle actors are well known. Duffy and Wallin are household names and have been invited into the living rooms of Canadians for years to explain the issues of the day to them on the nightly news. Now they are the stories. If these were no-name Senators, I don’t think the interest would be as high. Will it lead to a more engaged electorate? I think it can, but while it is too early to predict the issues that will dominate the 2015 federal election campaign, it does appear that the scandal will colour how voters will view the leaders and parties next time they vote. The jury as it were, while far from rendering judgement, is intently listening to opening arguments from the prosecution.

]]>While scientists rallied on Parliament Hill today, NDP MP Kennedy Stewart announced his intention to table the following motion.

That, in the opinion of the House, federal departments and agencies conducting scientific research should identify, develop, and implement communication policies that:

(i) actively support and encourage federal scientists to speak freely to the media and the public about scientific and technical matters based on their official research, including scientific and technical ideas, approaches, findings, and conclusions;

(i) allow federal scientists to present viewpoints that extend beyond their scientific research and incorporate their expert or personal opinions providing they specify they are not speaking on behalf of, or as a representative, of their department or agency;

(iii) ensure that public affairs or communications officers, elected officials, and Ministerial staff do not restrict, limit, or prevent federal scientists from responding to media requests in a timely and accurate manner;

(iv) prohibit public affairs or communications officers, elected officials, and Ministerial staff from directing federal scientists to suppress or alter their findings;

and (v) affirm the right of federal scientists to review, approve, and comment publicly on the final version of any proposed publication that significantly relies on their research, identifies them as an author or contributor, or purports to represent their scientific opinion.

It’s not clear yet when or how exactly this will be put to the House and motions of this sort aren’t binding.

Jonathon Gatehouse wrote this past spring about the Harper government’s relationship with science and Chris Turner, the journalist and former Green candidate, has a book out next month on the same subject.

]]>The aftereffects in Alberta of the Nov. 26 Calgary-Centre federal byelection, carried off by Conservative Joan Crockatt with just 37 per cent of the vote, have officially become super hilarious. The reader will recall that the two main challengers for a Conservative seat in a relatively liberal-friendly part of Calgary were the capital-L Liberal Harvey Locke, who has spent decades as a top wilderness preservation advocate and all-around Nature Boy, and the Green Party’s Chris Turner, an urbanist author and magazine writer who uses the word “sustainable” with a frequency best characterized as “intolerable”. In short, the two parties both nominated professional environmentalists, neither of whom have done a whole lot else with their lives. We could all probably have anticipated a problem here.

How does a Green candidate run against a Harvey Locke? Turner was shrewd and cynical enough to find an answer: berate the older guy as an out-of-touch Seventies green who, as Locke had admitted in an interview, didn’t even move to Calgary from Banff until it looked like there might be a Commons seat available amid Cowtown’s dark Sanatic mills. (Asked by your correspondent if she approved of this campaigning style, Elizabeth May observed that the GPC is not one of those old-fashioned “top-down parties” in which the leader orders candidates about.) Locke, for his part, spluttered that his young rival was a “twerp”.

The twerp got about 7,000 votes, the old hippie got 9,000, and Crockatt, who did as little as humanly possible to distract the populace from any of this by appearing in public or uttering a sound, got 10,000. First past the post wins. (Although, to be honest with you, I have never really understood why that is our metaphor for “Most votes wins, even without a majority”. What does racing past a post have to do with it?)

The center/center-left in this province will not form government until we are in one big-tent party. At this moment in time, and objectively looking at the provincial platforms of the progressive parties, we are for all intents and purposes also a distinction without a difference.

In the last election the NDP, Liberals, Greens and Alberta Party agreed on policy 95 per cent of the time. We should all be together in one big tent; there is less difference between all of our political parties than there is between the different wings of the PC government.

This online op-ed caused the president of Hehr’s own party to blow his stack to smithereens. Todd Van Vliet issued a press release that positioned the Liberals as a distinct, individual-oriented alternative to the New Democratic “party of labour, unions, and social justice” and didn’t mention the Greens at all. Not content to stop there, he put forth some pretty astonishing insinuations about Hehr’s motives.

…While Mr. Hehr may be working in good faith to create a stronger alternative to the PCs, working to eliminate one’s own party would not seem to be the best way to do that.

…So what’s actually going on with Kent Hehr and his advisers? Well, the idea of a merger certainly isn’t news. It has been raised at the last NDP annual general meeting and dismissed, and raised again at the last Alberta Liberal board meeting, and again dismissed. So who does this “merger” actually benefit? One would have to say, the PCs.

He’s just sayin’! As a signal of his wholehearted embrace of the “dude are you even listening to the words coming out of your mouth” mode of rhetoric, Van Vliet warns that “Without the Liberals to balance the centre, the PCs gain a real possibility of staying in power for decades longer.” We need the Alberta Liberals to prevent the PCs from staying in power for decades? Golly, surely this is a bit like putting on granite swim-fins?

Van Vliet’s impatience is understandable, even if his rage isn’t. The Alberta Liberals passed through a short phase of merger discussions under their previous leader, the lugubrious peacenik Dr. David Swann, who is the previous leader and not the current one partly because he was so open to the idea. These “discussions” took the form of the Liberals discussing a merger and the New Democrats saying “Get bent, capitalist lackeys” over and over. When the Liberals proceeded to get rid of their fed-up physician and replace him with another fed-up physician, Dr. Raj Sherman, the resulting vote split in the 2012 general election was so clean and even that Joan Crockatt can only dream of such rapturous math: Liberals 127,645, NDP 126,752.

In view of this, partisans who regard continued PC government as an emergency are obviously right to consider a merger. They are equally obviously wrong to imagine it would get them anywhere in the total absence of a credible leader to rally behind. Ed Stelmach obliterated these parties in his one electoral trial, and, bad news, fellas, you’re not up against Ed Stelmach anymore. Hehr wants Liberals, New Democrats, Greens, Alberta Party hipsters, and presumably the Marxist-Leninists to “put down their guns” and unite in the hope of maybe, just possibly, taking back Official Opposition status for a progressive party. This confirms that Hehr is under the same delusions as Van Vliet: the NDP and the Liberals had Official Opposition status in Alberta for 30 years, and were spinning their wheels for about 29 of those. Whatever one thinks of the Wildrose Party’s philosophy, I think one must admit that they have made more effective use of the Opposition Leader’s office in eight months than anyone else did in the previous decade or more. If we’re applying the “Do they visibly annoy the Premier?” test they are already the all-time undisputed Alberta champions.

The Liberals and the NDP are zombie brands in Alberta now. Is Thomas “Dutch Disease” Mulcair’s leadership of the national NDP going to help Alberta’s Brian Mason woo voters? (This might be just me, but the time I saw them conduct a joint press conference it reminded me of feuding siblings trying to make nice for Nana at Christmas.) Will the coronation of Justin “Too Many Albertans” Trudeau help Raj Sherman get ahead? The private hope amongst their supporters, I suppose, is that Alberta history’s next Aberhart-like figure who comes out of nowhere and builds an overwhelming reputation outside party politics will choose to climb into their pickup truck. But this raises the question why such a person might conceivably need a ride in a rusted-out lemon.

]]>The Green candidate in the Calgary Centre byelection finds lessons in the result.

Once party nominations have occurred and staff has been assigned, strategies and platforms established, signs and literature produced, it’s not just logistically difficult but fundamentally undemocratic to insist on co-operation. This is for the simple reason that every vote counts and every voter remains entitled to a free choice on the ballot. Once the race is on, there’s no putting the horses back into the barn.

What’s more, the presumption that a strong third horse in the race splits the vote is often ignorant of the facts at street level on the campaign trail. This was certainly the case in Calgary Centre, where my campaign saw a huge gain in momentum throughout the latter half of the campaign – not by eroding Liberal backing (which remained steady at around 30 per cent throughout the campaign), but by capturing substantial wedges of support from disaffected Conservatives, NDP voters looking for a better chance at backing a winner, and unaligned voters. My campaign did not split the vote in Calgary; we built our own coalition on the Green Party’s broad, moderate platform.

]]>Last night’s Calgary Centre by-election, won by media personality and former newspaper editor Joan Crockatt, was held in the most pro-Naheed Nenshi part of what is now a very pro-Nenshi city. Like Crockatt last night, Nenshi exploited a split opposition to win the Calgary mayoralty in 2010. But Calgary’s civic Ward 8, which makes up about two-thirds of the Calgary Centre riding, is a place where the mayor dominated all other contestants combined, taking 58% of the vote. The Green Party’s Chris Turner has close ties to Nenshi (though the mayor didn’t endorse anybody), and Turner was clearly hoping to capitalize on that success, employing Nenshi campaign staffers and Nenshian social-media tactics.

It earned him 26% of the vote. That’s still an amazing figure for a Green Party-labelled candidate in Calgary—especially an unknown one with essentially no pre-existing local political apparatus to exploit. From a standing start, Turner earned 20 votes for every three cast for the NDP’s Dan Meades.

The more meaningful pre-election data, however, may have come not from 2010 but from this year’s provincial election, in which Calgary Centre covers about the same area as three downtown constituencies: Calgary-Elbow, home base of both Ralph Klein and Alison Redford; Calgary-Buffalo, the city’s Liberal stronghold; and Calgary-Currie. The right-wing Wildrose Party got 12,694 votes there in April, and one would have to think that many of them were among the 10,201 who made it out to vote for Conservative Crockatt last night. (Her campaign was as Wildrose-heavy as Turner’s was Nenshi-heavy.) The Liberals had 8,449 provincial votes in the zone, and federal Liberal Harvey Locke got 9,034 last night.

That doesn’t speak particularly well for Locke’s performance, despite the fact that he kept pace with Crockatt deep into the evening. Calgary Centre represented a great opportunity for the Liberals, and Locke is one of the province’s best-known and well-liked conservationists. He needed to add to a dwindling base of diehard brand-loyal Liberals to win; instead, a Green spoiler attacked him in direct mailings as “stuck in the us-against-them environmentalism of the past” and grabbed four votes to every five of Locke’s. This is a pretty brazen move for somebody running under Elizabeth May’s banner, but I’m betting we will see more deployment of this Environmentalism 2.0 card from Green candidates.

Which brings us to the bushwhacking of Justin Trudeau, who made some comments about how Albertans are ruining the country on TV in Quebec a couple of years ago and was suddenly confronted with them by Sun Media in the last days of the campaign. I don’t know that these comments would have discouraged a loyal Liberal from voting for Harvey Locke. But Locke was supposed to have a great deal of red-Tory support that would have once gone to the incumbent MP, old Lougheed hand Lee Richardson (now Premier Redford’s principal secretary). Since Crockatt lost half of Richardson’s vote share, those voters certainly went somewhere. Or, rather, nowhere. Justin’s shoot-at-Alberta-from-the-hip himbo explosion probably kept quite a few of them at home on a chilly November day.

There is a lot of doubt afoot about the possible relevance of Justin’s comments, but nobody is really questioning whether they were foolish; if he was placed in a no-win situation, whose fault is that? Hint: it’s not only Justin’s. Some of the blame must go to the Liberals who are supposedly his rivals for the party leadership, but are acting as though he is already their leader and it would be unseemly to criticize him in public. Any one of them could have stepped in with some sharp words and helped rescue Harvey Locke. Instead, Calgary seems quite justified in rejecting the Screw Alberta Party by a narrow margin.

Locke, a former president of the Alberta Liberal Party, is leaving the door open for another Liberal run in the next general election. Anything is possible. But while voters might have seen Locke as a victim of circumstance this time, wouldn’t the perception be very different in 2015, especially if Justin Trudeau is the leader? At that point, wouldn’t Locke seem to Alberta voters like one of those guys who just never learns?

]]>Welcome to live coverage of tonight’s by-elections in Victoria, Calgary Centre and Durham. Results should start coming in after 10pm when polls close in Victoria. We’ll be here all night (or at least as long as it takes to exhaust whatever drama can be found).

Some numbers by which to measure the night. First, the vote percentages from the 2011 election in each riding.

Durham
Conservatives 54.6
NDP 21.1
Liberals 17.9
Greens 5.4

Calgary Centre
Conservatives 57.7
Liberals 17.5
NDP 14.9
Greens 9.9

Victoria
NDP 50.8
Conservatives 23.6
Liberals 14.0
Greens 11.6

If you combine the 2011 results for those three ridings, the cumulative total divides like so.

Conservatives 44.3
NDP 30.0
Liberals 16.4
Greens 9.0

9:45pm. Beyond the obvious (who wins?), some questions for tonight. How low does the Conservative vote go in Calgary Centre? How well does the NDP vote from 2011 hold up? Can the Liberals show improvement? Can the Greens make significant gains?

Calgary Centre is obviously the riding to watch (although the numbers will still be interesting in Durham and Victoria). After the Conservative party was united, Lee Richardson won 51.2%, 55.4%, 55.6% and 57.7% in four elections. If the polls hold true, Joan Crockatt could win the riding, but finish with a total under 40%. The lowest total for a winning conservative in Calgary Centre is 40.1%, by the Reform party’s Eric Lowther, when the right was split between Reform and the Progressive Conservatives.

10:01pm. First results are in. With 15 polls reporting, Joan Crockatt has a nine-vote lead in Calgary Centre.

10:09pm. With 30 polls reporting, the Liberal lead in Calgary Centre is down to 35 votes. Meanwhile, Durham looks like a comfortable win for the Conservatives, though at the moment the Conservative vote is down slightly and the NDP vote is up.

10:12pm. Through 35 polls, Mr. Locke’s lead is 54 votes.

10:14pm. And just like that, with 40 polls in, Ms. Crockatt takes a 15-vote lead.

10:15pm. Back comes Mr. Locke. Through 45 polls, the candidates are tied with 990 votes.

10:23pm. It is of course notable that while Ms. Crockatt and Mr. Locke go back and forth, the Green party’s Chris Turner is getting a quarter of the vote in Calgary Centre. It will be tempting to suggest that, if Ms. Crockatt wins, it will be because the vote on the left was split, but I think that’s a problematic theory. Go back to the public polls in Calgary Centre. While the Green vote went up, the Liberal vote held steady. If anything, the rise in Green support coincided with a decline in the Conservative vote. If these numbers hold (as I write, Joan Crockatt is up slightly), the Conservatives will be down about 22 points and the NDP down about nine points. The Liberals will be up 14 points and the Greens will be up 15 points.

10:36pm. Safe to say Erin O’Toole will be the next MP for Durham. His share of the vote is down slightly (at the moment) from what Bev Oda took in 2011, but he’s still at 50%. The NDP looks like its share will be up and the Liberal vote will be down.

10:42pm. Still more than half the polls left to report, but Ms. Crockatt’s lead seems pretty steady. Through 100 polls, it’s 400 votes. Through 90 polls, it was 326 votes.

10:48pm. Meanwhile, in Victoria, the New Democrat (Murray Rankin) leads the Green candidate (Donald Galloway). A strong third in Calgary Centre and second in Victoria would probably qualify as a good night for the Greens.

10:53pm. That Conservative lead in Calgary Centre is narrowing. It was down to 334 votes through 111 polls. It’s now 238 votes through 121 polls.

10:55pm. Down to 218 votes through 126 polls. Up to 272 votes from 131 polls. Up to 293 votes through 135 polls.

11:04pm. Meanwhile, in Victoria, Mr. Galloway has a small lead through 24 polls. NDP and Conservative shares are down.

11:13pm. Ms. Crockatt’s lead went up to 400 votes and then back under 300 votes. Now it’s back over 300 votes. There are sporadic reports of other numbers (apparently from the Liberal side) showing the race even tighter than Elections Canada has so far reported.

11:27pm. Meanwhile, in Victoria, the Greens are back in the lead after losing it for a bit. At present, Victoria is, indeed, a “little bit Conservative.” Precisely, 12.8% Conservative.

11:36pm. Ms. Crockatt’s lead is now over 600 votes through 190 polls. If Macleans.ca would let me hire a decision desk that decision desk would be probably be advising me to call it.

11:50pm. So let’s now obsess over the Victoria results. The big issue in this by-election: poop. Namely, what to do with it. The New Democrat support a new sewage treatment plant, the Green candidate wanted a better plan. This debate resulted in Peter Julian and Elizabeth May getting mad at each other this evening on television. There was also some controversy over whether or not David Suzuki had actually endorsed Mr. Galloway.

12:00am. As we hit midnight in the eastern time zone, the NDP lead is 19 votes in Victoria through 120 polls.

12:04am. With 135 polls in, Mr. Galloway and the Greens take a three-vote lead.

12:13am. If the Greens win in Victoria, they’re the big story of the night. But even if they don’t get a win—they’re down 39 votes as I type—they might be the story. Chris Turner seems to have made gains at the Conservative party’s expense in Calgary Centre. And now Donald Galloway is making gains at the expense of the New Democrats and Conservatives in Victoria.

12:25pm. The Green lead is 141 votes.

12:29pm. Let us pause here to note that the Green nomination in Victoria, after a tied vote, was decided by a coin toss. But it was the guy who lost the coin toss that got the nomination.

Trevor Moat was declared the winner Saturday night, even giving his acceptance speech. However, he later learned that he and Galloway had been tied and that his victory was based on a coin toss. “I requested time to reflect on this unprecedented and unanticipated result to determine what would be best for the Green party and for me,” Moat said in statement.

After some soul searching, Moat decided Galloway — who has a full slate of volunteers in place, has been an adviser to the party and has a number of high-profile supporters in environmental and academic circles — was the stronger candidate.

12:47am. The Green lead reached 300 votes at one point, but just like that the NDP’s Murray Rankin has taken a 200-vote lead.

12:55am. The NDP lead is now nearly 400 votes and so suddenly it seems that the Conservatives and New Democrats will hold their respective ridings tonight.

1:11am. The NDP lead is now more than 800 votes with 205 polls in and so it seems Murray Rankin will soon join Joan Crockatt and Erin O’Toole in the House of Commons.

1:26am. Democracy never sleeps, but I do. With Victoria looking decided, I’m off to bed. We’ll look at the final numbers in the morning.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/byelection-brouhaha-calgary-centre-durham-and-victoria/feed/45The state of play in Calgary Centrehttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-state-of-play-in-calgary-centre/
Fri, 23 Nov 2012 13:00:11 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=318472A new poll, this time from Return on Insight, gives the Conservatives a five-point lead over the Liberals in Calgary Centre.
Here are the top numbers in the four public…

Williams told me an Ontario MP’s far-away musings typically wouldn’t make much difference—except that this is a hard-fought three-way race, in which even a marginal shift in voter preferences might matter.

“The Conservatives are going to try to milk it for all it’s worth,” she said. “If this does cost the Liberals votes, would those votes by more likely to go to Joan Crockatt or Chris Turner? I’d have to say Chris Turner.” Her reasoning: “Turner has a lot in common with Locke. They’re both strong environmentalists.” As well, Williams doubts centrist voters—some of whom have swung from Conservative voting in the past to leaning Liberal this time—won’t see going Green as all that jarring a transition. “The Green party isn’t particularly left, it’s more centre.”

]]>With the Calgary Centre by-election coming up Monday, the impact of Ottawa Liberal MP David McGuinty’s miserably maladroit “go back to Alberta” comment on his party’s chances there is the political question of the hour.

The Liberal candidate, Harvey Locke, has been running a strong campaign. But will Conservatives be able to use McGuinty’s choice of words to draw votes away from Locke and into the column of his Tory rival, Joan Crockatt?

Or is it more likely, as some are speculating, that any Calgary Centre voters thinking twice about supporting the Liberal will instead switch to Chris Turner, the Green candidate?

I called Lori Williams, a policy studies professor at Calgary’s Mount Royal University, for a quick reaction from close to the by-election action. (As it happens, Mount Royal hosted a by-election candidates’ debate today; Crockatt didn’t show, and not for the first time.)

Williams told me an Ontario MP’s far-away musings typically wouldn’t make much difference—except that this is a hard-fought three-way race, in which even a marginal shift in voter preferences might matter.

“The Conservatives are going to try to milk it for all it’s worth,” she said. “If this does cost the Liberals votes, would those votes by more likely to go to Joan Crockatt or Chris Turner? I’d have to say Chris Turner.”

Her reasoning: “Turner has a lot in common with Locke. They’re both strong environmentalists.” As well, Williams doubts centrist voters—some of whom have swung from Conservative voting in the past to leaning Liberal this time—won’t see going Green as all that jarring a transition. “The Green party isn’t particularly left, it’s more centre.”

And Williams says Crockatt faces an uphill struggle in a last-ditch bid to coax back any voters impelled by McGuinty’s remark into abandoning Locke—if indeed he suffers as a result of McGuinty’s mistake, which remains a very big if.

That fact that Crockatt has drawn critical comment from Naheed Nenshi, Calgary’s popular mayor, has to hurt her with any voters who were already leaning toward other parties. “Mayor Nenshi won lots of support across the city,” Williams noted, “but one his strongest areas of support is the Calgary Centre territory.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/would-tories-or-greens-benefit-if-mcguintys-words-affect-calgary-centre/feed/28Is it possible to manipulate a poll?http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/is-it-possible-to-manipulate-a-poll/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/is-it-possible-to-manipulate-a-poll/#commentsTue, 20 Nov 2012 17:24:30 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=316888Dave Climenhaga suggests the Greens are trying to game the polls in Calgary Centre.So it is significant – though impossible to criticize – that a Green Party organizer emailed …

]]>Dave Climenhaga suggests the Greens are trying to game the polls in Calgary Centre.

So it is significant – though impossible to criticize – that a Green Party organizer emailed committed supporters a note headed “There is another poll tonight – be sure to pick up,” not long before the latest survey. “Word from Chris Turner’s Head Quarters is that another poll is being conducted at this very moment,” said the email from Green Party Volunteer Co-ordinator Natalie Odd to committed Turner supporters. “Please be sure to pick up any calls your receive this evening!”

The emails were followed up with phone calls to supporters, although the pollster actually appears to have called a day later than the party expected. In addition to such emails and calls, Mr. Turner’s supporters posted similar messages on Facebook and some people distributed the call-display number the polling company was using.

This bit of gamesmanship seems to involve two assumptions: that it’s possible to manipulate a poll and that a good showing in a poll can precipitate a good showing on election day. The sample sizes used so far in Calgary Centre have been relatively small, but I’m not sure what the relative odds are that something like this could be pulled off. I can imagine that poll numbers could influence turnout and the result, but what are the odds that alerting supporters to the possibility of a poll would result in enough people responding to a survey who normally wouldn’t to significantly impact the results of that poll? I invite any and all mathematicians in the crowd to sort that out.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/is-it-possible-to-manipulate-a-poll/feed/12Maybe it really is a race?http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/maybe-it-really-is-a-race/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/maybe-it-really-is-a-race/#commentsMon, 19 Nov 2012 16:08:53 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=316320A new Forum Research poll finds results in Calgary Centre similar those reported a week ago.A poll released Sunday by Forum Research in Calgary Centre found 35 per cent …

]]>A new Forum Research poll finds results in Calgary Centre similar those reported a week ago.

A poll released Sunday by Forum Research in Calgary Centre found 35 per cent in the riding plan to vote for Ms. Crockatt, while Liberal Harvey Locke had 30-per-cent support, the Green Party’s Chris Turner, 25 per cent, and the NDP’s Dan Meades, 8 per cent. Those numbers have not changed, given the margin of error of five percentage points, since a similar poll for a week ago. But it’s a 13-point drop for Ms. Crockatt, who stood at 48-per-cent support in a similar poll conducted a few weeks earlier.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/maybe-it-really-is-a-race/feed/2Let’s all freak out about Calgary Centrehttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/lets-all-freak-out-about-calgary-centre/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/lets-all-freak-out-about-calgary-centre/#commentsWed, 14 Nov 2012 16:21:44 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=314584It’s just one poll and the sample is small and the margin of error is high and the riding has never been anything other than Conservative… but for the sake…

]]>It’s just one poll and the sample is small and the margin of error is high and the riding has never been anything other than Conservative… but for the sake of finding some excitement in this fall’s by-elections, you could imagine that Calgary Centre might be a race.

As reported by the Globe & Mail, the November survey of 376 randomly selected residents in Calgary-Centre showed Ms. Crockatt with 32% to 30% for Mr. Locke and 23% for Mr. Turner. New Democrat Dan Meades was in fourth place with 12%. The survey is considered to be accurate by plus or minus five percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

If this new survey is to be believed, then the November 26 vote could be much more exciting than most political watchers, including myself, had previously predicted. A similar survey conducted by Forum Research in October found Ms. Crockatt with 48% to 28% for Mr. Locke, 11% for Mr. Turner, and 8% for Mr. Meades. Another survey from Forum Research conducted in August found the Conservatives with 44% to 21% for the Liberals, 14% for the NDP, and 12% for the Greens. It appears that within a matter of months, the 40% margin of victory earned by former Conservative MP Lee Richardson in the 2011 federal election and 23% margin for the Conservatives found in the September survey may have completely evaporated.